Pricing Madness

So I see that IBM decided to treat dual-core CPUs as a single chip for licensing purposes. Smart people like Tim Bray have, correctly IMHO, responded by pointing out that per-CPU licensing schemes are stupid to begin with. Now, I can let Tim get away with some Sun hypocrisy since he’s new there, and is likely unfamiliar with the entire Sun product line. But when more longer term Sun employees, like Simon Phipps, chime in with lines like “It makes no more sense to charge per-CPU than it does to charge per-memory chip.” I just can’t help but point out that

SUN CHARGES **PER-GIGABYTE** FOR THE SAM-FS/QFS FILESYSTEM STACK!!!

That’s right, if you live in a Sun shop and have some big storage requirements you pretty much *need* something better than the stock UFS in Solaris. You only have two choices right now: Give your money to Veritas for VxFS/VxVM. Or pay for SAM-FS/QFS, which Sun charges, unbelievably, by the fucking gigabyte. Storage software. Priced by the gigabyte. You’d have to be insane to buy it.

Which is maybe the point. If you really, really need it, Sun has an in-house option for you. Better than buying Veritas (who also have a ridiculous pricing scheme based on the “class” of system which basically comes down to “these guys *have* more money, so we’ll *charge* them more money!”), I guess they figure. “And anyways, soon enough we’ll have ZFS and our filesystem won’t suck! And in the mean time let’s make sure not too many people actually deploy this SAM-FS/QFS shit cause it’s a fucking support nightmare. So let’s cook up some hair-ball pricing scheme that will scare nearly everyone away. Oh! I know! Let’s charge per gigabyte! Yeah! Per gigabyte! Hahahaha! Ha! Hahaha! Per gigabyte!”.

So either lay off the pricing lectures, or give us ZFS.

Update 04/04/05: Linked to a Jonathon post about per-CPU pricing after Simon incorrectly got the idea that I was bitching about him when in fact I was simply whining about ZFS not being here yet.

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You’re currently reading “Pricing Madness,” an entry on VMUNIX Blues

Published:: 04.25.05 / 12am

Category:: general, solaris, storage

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VMUNIX Blues is written by me, Mark Mayo, in Vancouver, BC. I like unix, coding, and the web, and naturally most articles I write here have something to do with what I like. If commenting on an article isn’t your style, you can always email me — mark (at) vmunix.com.

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Peter Tribble 04.25.05 / 1pm

Just to clarify, QFS is a simple per host license (although tiered); it’s the sam-fs part that’s priced per terabyte. As a replacement, ZFS fits in the QFS realm, although without the ability to share filesystems. I wholeheartedly agree though that the whole pricing for samfs and qfs is plain silly.

mark 04.25.05 / 1pm

Thanks for the clarification Peter. The pricing is indeed silly, especially in the face of what’s become available in the Linux camp. XFS. Reiser. CXFS. GFS. Lustre. Lots of quality options whether you need shared SAN or not, and great performance. We actually moved a mail server off Solaris to Linux+XFS and almost doubled the performance. I’d bet money that the gains were nearly all due to the filesystem. A lot cheaper, *and* a lot easier than going to VxFS or QFS..

Simon Phipps 05.04.05 / 3pm

So you’re saying I can’t point out the obvious because my employer hasn’t finished following through yet? How do you think one brings about change? By keeping quiet until everyone has fixed everything?

I am not making cheap marketing shots on my blog, nor speaking for Sun, I am saying what I think personally and trying to change things by doing so. Criticise my ideas if you wish but please don’t start lecturing me on the fact that sometimes my ideas don’t resonate totally with what Sun is doing - they leave me unfettered to speak and for that I am grateful.

mark 05.04.05 / 11pm

Dude. Chill.

Now. Several points.

I wasn’t intending to comment on *you* whatsoever. Or suggest what *you* can or can’t do. I didn’t criticise your idea. I criticised Sun.

Sun, your employer. The one that hosts your blog. If you post on blogs.sun.com, you *are* speaking for Sun at some level. Suggesting otherwise is naive, IMHO.

Now, to the real point. I was attempting to point out that Sun, as an organization, is presenting a mixed message right now. And it’s sometimes frustrating if you’re a Sun customer. I could have just as easily linked to Jonathon’s arguments about per-cpu pricing (who presumably does speak for Sun), and actually I intended to link the word “lecture” to a Jonathon post. But I forgot. It just happened that I read your comment directly after Tim’s and also just happened to recieve a quote on a SAMFS expansion an hour later.

I think what you’re doing is wonderful, and have in fact have openly told Sun executives here in Canada that the recent “opening up” of Sun via blogging was almost single handedly responsible for my decision to go back to Sun for technology after a several year hiatus. Open means a lot.

So keep it up. Keep bringing change. But please realize that there are lots of Sun customers out there, like myself, that have been largely left high and dry over the last 5 years. We may still harbour some bitterness that we had no choice but to venture into LinuxLand.